I'm about the purchase a liscense for UBB to start my first forum after trying out the demo. To me it seems way more reasonably priced and I like this little support community.

With that said, and remember I'm very new to this:

1) I'm hoping to grow into a very large community over time. Tens of thousands of members, hundreds of thousands of posts and pms, etc. What am I looking at hosting wise as far as size needed, any particular hosting sites, and special types of hosting?

2) I bought my domain on Godaddy.com then created a homepage on MSN. Do I need to purchase the larger hosting site before purchasing the UBB liscense or can I purchase the UBB liscense under MSN then transfer everything to the hosting site?

3) Anything else I should consider as far as hosting, any particular hosting sites work for you? Anything I need to think about in advance that I might not of yet?

Like I said so far I've purchased a domain and designed a homepage. That's it.

Again I apologize if these questions are ridiculous, I'm a noob.

ThanksMark

Express Hosting

Express Hosting
"We are the official hosting company of UBB.threads. Ask us about our free migration services to migrate your UBB.threads installation."

There are 2 routes you could go on this. When your site is really big, then you'd definitely be looking at some type of VPS/Dedicated hosting. So the 2 options would be to go with a beefy right out of the gate, or go with something a bit more moderate and move up to a larger plan as your site grows.

The second option is what most people do. They'll start with a smaller hosting plan and then move to something bigger when it's needed.

You'd need to have your hosting purchased in order to install UBB, as it will need to be installed on the server, so you'll want to get that taken care of.

Not really much required beyond that. Who you choose for hosting is probably the toughest part. There are so many different providers available and everyone has different experiences with them.

Some that seem to popup quite a bit are webintellects.com, hostgator.com, godaddy, lunarpages and a couple others.

I'd never recommend any hosting company that charges such a small amount and says "unlimited hosting". They'll only charge you $4 per month, but normally you'll end up on a shared server that is way oversold, and your site will be extremely slow because of it.

It is important to get a decent host to start with when trying to grow your community, since if the site is slow or unresponsive at times, it may turn potential users away.

wish, I just started a board myself. It takes time to grow a good community so I would start with a smaller hosting plan then upgrade when the time came.

I currently have my board on a GoDaddy hosting account that I have had for years. I knew I had enough space and band with to get me started. I am not pushing GoDaddy there are a lot of other hosting companies out there.

Thanks for all the feedback! I think I'm going to start with a basic plan at Lunarpages, $5 per month. I think that will have everything I need to get started. Again, UBB is great as far as customer support.

well if you run into a SNAFU... most of us will at least try to walk you through it. I am not the world renowned expert some of these guys are, but I went with my own server with my own bandwidth, changed from Windows based to Linux based with the help of Gizmo and Sir Dude, and Rick so yeah anything is possible. It can be daunting at first, but as has been said before, you can't really mess up a new board, you can always delete and start over. Then when it happens and you have posts and people that you don't want to lose, most of us can walk you through getting your database etc. back so you really don't lose anything...

Key... Make backups of the database whenever possible.. new boards probably once a month is fine... (or right before you start upgrades or mods as well)... as you get busier though maybe bi-weekly or even weekly backups will be a good practice.